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Mother says son alive an hour after shooting

Posted: Thursday, April 10, 2003

ANCHORAGE (AP) -- An Anchorage woman said her own investigation of her son's shooting death six months ago shows he lay alive and bleeding for an hour inside a mall parking lot because of a dispatcher's error.

Adele Davis said city officials have not been forthcoming about the circumstances surrounding the death of her 18-year-old son, Dustin Lloyd. Davis blamed Mayor George Wuerch in particular.

''This betrayal reaches the highest level of our city government,'' Davis said at a press conference arranged by Victims for Justice, an advocacy organization.

Wuerch said that Davis had misconstrued the information but her anger and frustration were understandable.

''She's a woman in trauma. She's lost her son. There is no more painful experience for a mother than to lose a child,'' Wuerch told the Anchorage Daily News. ''This woman is under extreme stress. My heart goes out to her.''

Lloyd was shot in a stairwell of the J.C. Penney parking garage downtown during a marijuana deal Oct. 10. Police initially responded to a different parking garage because of a dispatching error.

One of the first officers on the scene radioed in that Lloyd was breathing and told the dispatcher to keep medics coming, according to a dispatch log that Davis obtained from Deputy Police Chief Mark Mew last week.

''That is different from the rest of the evidence,'' Wuerch said. ''His wounds were fatal.''

An earlier notation on the same log says ''apparent DOA'' -- dead on arrival.

He couldn't have been saved, agreed Mary Anne Henry, an assistant district attorney, on Wednesday.

Lloyd technically bled to death, but when vital organs are hit, as his were, the wounds can be too severe to repair, she said.

If paramedics thought there was a chance of saving him, they would have rushed him to the hospital, she said. But his body hadn't been moved when she arrived at the shooting scene about 45 minutes after police.

The state medical examiner, Dr. Franc Fallico, initially estimated that Lloyd died within a minute and later said Lloyd would have died even if he had been shot in the parking lot of a hospital, Henry said.

Police were alerted to the shooting by a 911 call around 1:48 p.m. that day. But the call came from a different parking garage, and the dispatcher didn't hear the caller say ''J.C. Penney's.'' She traced the call to a pay phone and directed officers there. They found nothing and figured it was a joke.

Then, 58 minutes later, a parking attendant called from the J.C. Penney's garage to report a shooting victim. Police got to Lloyd within minutes.

The teenager who shot Lloyd said he was acting in self-defense during a tussle over a drug deal, and the matter was moved to federal court.

Miguel Orellana pleaded guilty last week in U.S. District Court to firing a gun in connection to a drug deal, dealing marijuana and having a handgun while being an unlawful marijuana user.